Conventionally, information technology (hereinafter “IT”) organizations consolidate physical servers into a smaller set of physical servers running many virtual servers. In this virtual server environment, most or all hardware resources, such as memory, central processing unit (CPU), storage and network are shared among the virtual servers. Many organizations are reducing the number of physical servers through virtualization technologies which allow for multiple virtual servers to run on one or more physical servers. With consolidation of servers it is inevitable that capacity bottlenecks will develop in sharing or resources such as CPU, RAM, and Storage. That is, if the shared resources are over-utilized, users can experience performance degradation and even downtime.
Conventional approaches for determining capacity bottlenecks is very labor intensive, requiring system administrators to manually examine numerous capacity graphs to determine where bottlenecks exist. That is, using conventional capacity reporting software is extremely time consuming and requires examination of hundreds of charts. For example, in a small environment with only 50 ESX hosts, a systems administrator would have to study nearly 260 graphs to evaluate utilization of just four resources: (50 Hosts+5 clusters+10 Resource Pools)*4 Resource types=260 graphs.
Furthermore, conventional techniques do not provide any means for proactively managing and allocating shared resources in a virtual environment. For example, conventional approaches do not anticipate resource allocation or future utilization that may lead to bottlenecks in CPU, memory, storage and disk Input/Output (hereinafter “I/O”), which can lead to performance problems and costly downtime situations. Likewise, conventional systems do not provide means for dealing with over-allocation of resources which can drive up the cost per virtual machine and diminishing returns on the investment in virtualization.
Furthermore, conventional systems management products are not designed to solve critical virtualization issues at the speed at which an organization (such as an IT organization) demands. Conventional systems management products include multitude of features pre-packaged with the installation—most of these features are not needed and are never used. The drawbacks of such conventional systems range from complex implementations and instruction manuals with superfluous information to unnecessary hardware and software resource consumption, as well as delays in deployment and installation. For example, conventional systems are time consuming, involve repetitive discovery and lack integration among system management applications, amongst other disadvantages and deficiencies.
Embodiments of the present invention address the above-noted drawbacks associated with conventional approaches to management and allocation of shared resources in a virtualized environment.